Monday, October 3, 2016

ETC2 planar block only output created with etcpak

Bartosz Taudul (etcpak author) sent these ETC2 planar block only encodings in a reply to my previous post. For planar-only they look amazing!

Note: I've verified these images myself by hacking etcpak's ProcessRGB_ETC2() function to immediately "return result.first" after it calls Planar( src ); It returns all planar blocks in this case. I've verified this by generating a histogram of the used ETC1/2 modes in all the encoded blocks.

Hey GPU texture format engineers: Come on, give us more basis functions to play with! I'm starting to look more deeply at ETC2 encoded textures, and a surprising amount of blocks in some textures are using planar mode vs. the other ETC2 modes.

He also says that etcpak uses planar blocks quite often (blue indicates a planar block):

About Me

Back in the day I worked for several years at Digital Illusions on things like the first shipping deferred shaded game ("Shrek" - 2001), software renderers, and game AI. Then, after working for Microsoft at Ensemble Studios for 5 years as engine lead on Halo Wars, I took a year off to create "crunch", an advanced DXTc texture compression library. I then worked 5 years at Valve, where I contributed to Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, and the Linux versions of Valve's Source1 games. I was one of the original developers on the Steam Linux team, where I worked with a (somewhat enigmatic) multi-billionare on proving that OpenGL could still hold its own vs. Direct3D. I also started the vogl (Valve's OpenGL debugger) project from scratch, which I worked on for over a year. In my spare time I work on various open source lossless and texture compression projects: crunch, LZHAM, miniz, jpeg-compressor, and picojpeg.